What's up guys?
I have a question I've been wondering about for quite some time. The content in this question is anecdotal, and I don't expect users on this forum to necessarily believe it, but I would like to ask it anyways, assuming it may be true.
My mom has had multiple episodes where she will have a feeling about something, and it will turn out to be true, mostly with regards to deaths.
For example: when her aunt died, she woke up early in the morning, and felt really cool air against her. The next day, she was told that at that exact time, her aunt died. The thing is this kind of stuff has happened at least 30 times since I have been alive. If it happened once or twice I would brush it off, but she will either have a dream or some kind of strange feeling, only to find out that again, someone has passed on. Once she had a dream about a man she had known in school and hadn't seen in about 15-20 years. In the dream, he died.
. Sure enough, the next day, she saw in the newspaper that he had committed suicide. Another time she had a dream about a person drowning, and it turned out that one of her relatives had drowned to death that same day. I know people on this forum will likely say either: I am making this up, conformation bias, or over exaggeration. I'm seriously not joking. It has happened at least 20 times.
I want to know, if this is in fact true that she has this rare ability to detect someone's death, would that prove that humans have souls?
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Your mom has a dream about death, the next day someone she know dies. Coincidence or does she posses visionary powers?
The first thing I would want to know is how many 'death dreams' did she have in the past before nailing a 'result'?
A bit like gamblers. They always like to talk about their winnings. They seldom mention their losses.
Fortune Tellers seem to have an uncanny ability to know things about people they have only just met ("how could she possibly know I have recently suffered the loss of a loved one?" ...... errrr ... "Because you are a late middle aged person who is attending a Fortune Telling, sheer percentage would make that guess quite likely")
I have no desire to cast aspersions about you mom R-T but I thought the days of incredulity about the sort of thing you describe above were behind intelligent humans.
On the other hand, maybe she's a witch !!!!!!
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It has happened at least 20 times, and I have no idea what the cause of it is.
"I want to know, if this is in fact true that she has this rare ability to detect someone's death, would that prove that humans have souls?"
>>Well you seem to have answered your own question here:
"Russian-Tank "It has happened at least 20 times, and *****I have no idea**** what the cause of it is."
Until you do with evidence to support it we can draw no objective conclusions.
Russian-Tank,
As it says in Leviticus 19:31 (CEV) = "Don’t make yourselves disgusting to me by going to people who claim they can talk to the dead."
This is an interesting passage since it says that the people who claimed to have seen and talked to the resurrected Yeshua were just full of fong. And we know that the dead do not rise, unless you're watching a zombie movie.
The next time there's a vision get the list of winning lottery numbers.
"Your mom has a dream about death, the next day someone she know dies. Coincidence or does she posses visionary powers?
The first thing I would want to know is how many 'death dreams' did she have in the past before nailing a 'result'?
A bit like gamblers. They always like to talk about their winnings. They seldom mention their losses."
>>Well done, this is called the sharp shooter fallacy, like throwing a dart and the drawing a bulls-eye around it after it has landed. It's based on selection bias of course. It's very hard to argue with logic that loudly proclaims a baby falling into the street and rolling unharmed through busy traffic as a 'miracle' but then shrug their shoulders and blithely describes a baby falling 6 inches and fatally fracturing it's skull on a coffee table corner as 'bad luck'.
Time for some science...it could be his mother is a duck!
She's a witch. Burn her
But how do you KNOW she is a witch?
Well, she turned me into a newt.
I got turned into a newt once.
It got better.
Say it with me... Confirmation Bias
@Russian Tank: "please bare with me"
No. Try "bear with me." Asking strangers to take their clothes off isn't polite.
@Russian-Tank: It has happened at least 20 times, and I have no idea what the cause of it is.
I have no idea how magicians make a dove appear from a handkerchief but I know it's nothing to do with the paranormal or supernatural.
ok Big George, if you found out that people could actually have that ability, and it was scientifically verified, would you say that demonstrates the existence of souls?
@Russian-Tank: "would you say that demonstrates the existence of souls?"
Why would the ability to predict the future imply the existence of souls. What's the connection?
That is a really good point George.
My friend's mom has similar experiences, except she dreams of water before someone dies.
"My friend's mom has similar experiences, except she dreams of water before someone dies."
She must dream of water a lot, I mean how many people die everyday? Do you give here dreams more credence if someone drowns? I dreamed someone would win the lottery last week, and sure enough the very next day.....the week before I dreamed about a steak dinner, and guess what I ate tonight, go on guess!!
You are basically talking about premonitions. An ability to see into the future.
People who have claimed to have this ability (we are back with 'Fortune Tellers' as I mentioned above) have been subject to controlled scientific study in the past. All of them were found to be charlatans.
Therefore my answer to your question is this: People do not have the ability to see into the future, anymore than they have the ability to fly. That is why such a phenomenon has never been verified scientifically in the past and it is extremely unlikely to be in the future.
Souls are like God(s) ......non-existent.
but what I am talking about isn't premonition, more like she is able to detect it while it is going on
@Russian-Tank
"...she is able to detect it while it is going on."
Is she? How do you know? Is she waking from these dreams and calling you in the middle of the night telling you someone just died? Is she recording the dreams as they occur on something that automatically records the time and date in a tamper proof way?
Or is she telling you next day or next week when she's notified of the death that she had a dream about it?
I don't mean to diss your Mum, but I've known a lot of people in my time who want a sixth sense so badly, they've talked themselves into confirmation bias to get it. Hell, most of the professional suburban "psychics" truly believe they have a gift and they do - just not the gift they think they have. They're gifted cold readers, they're very observant and their clients give them a great deal of information about themselves without realising it. The clients also conveniently miss the 101 misses and only remember the 1 or 2 hits.
@ Russian-Tank: she is able to detect it while it is going on.
Well, I've got a bulls**t detector and right now it is reading in the red .......
Russian Yank: So, the morning that your mother felt cool air against her she wrote down the time? In a notebook or on a scrap of paper?
This is why I think skepticism is dumb. People are calling this nonsense, for no other reason than because they think its nonsense. I think its nonsense too, but I'm also not going to dismiss it as if it weren't happening, or it was a scam, I'm going to try to understand it.
My personal opinion about stories like this, is that the brain is picking up tiny bits of information, that lets the person know something is wrong. We've all had that feeling before. Not everything we experience reaches our conscious awareness, the brain is working in the background too. It may choose to simply present that information directly into consciousness, or may present that information as a feeling or emotion, and in this case, it might take apart that information while we sleep and dream. We are social beings, the death of someone gets communicated socially, and we can definitely sense the difference. That information travels.
Ironically enough Big George, that's what your "bulls**t detector" is. Just your emotions, telling you something is off, its the same intuition that the lady is having. Something is wrong, they can feel it.
@John 61X Breezy: "the brain is picking up tiny bits of information"
That's true. We all unconsciously pick up scraps of information and then assemble them and fill in the gaps in different ways. Hunches, intuitions, gut instincts... But always there is information, even if we're not directly aware of it. But the OP was hinting at some form of ESP. That's where I get skeptical. To the best of my knowledge, none of the tests, from JB Rhine to the Ghostbusters, have ever proven anything. Do you have any information to contradict that?
And I still don't see the connection between precognition and the existence of souls.
Right; I can predict the future of a system given its state and evolution laws; does not require souls.
I don't think the OP is saying anything was predicted, only detected.
@John 61X Breezy: "I don't think the OP is saying anything was predicted, only detected."
Ok. My mistake. So she detects death at a distance through ripples in the force or something. Have any scientific tests ever yielded any evidence for that sort of ability?
And I still don't see the connection with souls.
Fun fact: When I was learning how to do research and statistics, they did a good job of letting us know the weaknesses of the various methods we're learning. When they taught us to calculate significance, we learned how controversial the whole idea is. There's a group of psychologists that want to ban significance testing altogether. I forgot if it was done purposefully, but an article in support of precognition and ESP was published in a pretty well known journal, mainly because it passed the significance testing.
That said. when you ask me if any scientific tests have yielded evidence for that sort of ability, my initial thought is how would you even test it? There's literally no way to isolate the variables, unless the researcher is also a fortune-teller, and knows ahead of time when the participant will have the dream, and who the person that dies will be. Which means we have no evidence for or against the claim. All we have is an idea of how the world works, which either allows or disallows these sorts of events.
It is easy to test supernatural claims like that; on paper anyway. The problem is those who claim to have such abilities almost universally refuse to participate in serious tests. I wonder why?
Mm. Strange, isn’t it? You'd think that if you had proof positive that The Afterlife is True, you'd break your own neck to get out The Good News, wouldn’t you? It's your civic duty!
But I've watched a few of those mediums on tv and I think I know what the problem is. Heaven sucks. It induces intellectual entropy, fast. Have you noticed the trivial information the dearly departed tell these mediums?
"I'm getting something about a red top with buttons and the letter "M"? Oh! It's your mum, dear, but it's not a red TOP, it's a red VAN? It ran her down in the street and she spun on her ass like a top for a full five minutes?. You say mum's head landed 50 metres up the road? How sad, dear. But mum wants you to know she's happy and she's proud of you! She says you'll find that thing you've misplaced in the last place you look. What? No dear, I'm sorry. Mum's so excited to be with you again I can't quite see what the thing is! Oh, she's smiling! She says you can be a little absent minded sometimes! She says great grandad says hello! Oh. It was great grandad driving the red van and it wasn't an accident? Well, everything's fine between them now! There are no grudges in Heaven, dear. Heaven is Love! Somebody else is coming through now. I'm getting a black dog? Or maybe it's a cat? Or a pony? Something about a black goldfish with googly eyes? Oh! Its you, dear? You wanted a black pony when you were a little girl? " ...
Seriously, if I'm reduced to drivel like that, I'm not going to Heaven. I refuse. It's clearly compulsory for the dearly departed to sound like braindead twits, because they all talk like that. I'd prefer to be jailed in Hell as a conscientious objector, thanks.
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